Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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It predominantly focuses on the geographic perspective of gender and how sexism functions on the ground. In this rich, engaging book the feminist geographer Leslie Kern envisions how we might transform the "city of men" into a city for everyone. However, Kern points out the city serves as a useful backdrop for important female friendships and serves as the center for many protests that have helped women have their voices heard.

But this is the first book I read that discusses this topic from this perspective and I am interested to learn more. This makes it unrealistic to apply one single solution or to have an overarching ‘master’ plan where there are ‘endless options’ (176). A lot of other works on gender and urbanism don't acknowledge other identities past cis-women so this was refreshing.One might think that white men are a homogenous group of rich and privileged, moreover, no woman ever has got a degree in architecture and if she, by a miraculous chance, did, then she always resisted the pressure from the system. Leslie Kern does a great job writing with intersectionality in mind, but Feminist City is limited by its frequent retelling of the author's own experiences as a straight, White, able-bodied, middle-class woman living in Toronto. Kern summarizes the work of many interesting thinkers and activists, and recounts her personal experiences as a young woman and, later, mother struggling to navigate urban spaces. However she draws on the work of others to highlight that disabled individuals, people of colour, LGBTQ+ communities and other marginalised groups will all have different experiences within the city framework and identifies how geography further marginalises these communities. Her work is rooted in feminist geography, a discipline focusing on how the lived experiences of individuals and groups are influenced by social and spatial locations.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics. But it's a rather condescending approach – she admits that women poorer than her might feel differently, but if a woman has means to go to a restaurant, she must feel as threatened there as Kern does. As an alternative vision, I suggest that ‘gender mainstreaming’ strategies that have emerged in the European context might be more promising.This dearth of places for to relieve oneself is, both literally and figuratively of course, just the tiny, pointed tip of the iceberg that is the patriarchal city. An indicator that speaks volumes about urban space and dynamics of power is the possibility to walk alone in the street.

All of that said, I very much appreciated the Canadian focus that Kern brings and I only wish she could have spoken more about the particularities of Sackville and small Canadian municipalities in a book of these ambitions. This original study of the gendering processes occurring in the neoliberal city is a significant addition to scholarly debate on cities and gender.Kern clearly loves cities, and believes in their potential: "The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns and rural communities.